So here I switch right into a battle chapter, right? Good patterning. Build up and then fighting.
Dude, life is never that simple.
I don't know how they found me. They never told me and the investigation has never concluded who gave them the data.
Look, I was up on commo with the States. We were using BFTs. Everybody in the Pentagon and various other places with the right clearance could tell where we were and our more or less status as well as I could when I was in the van.
One of these days I'm going to find the guy with the "right clearance" and feed him his ass. And other parts. Slowly. Without mustard.
We're in consultation with the Kurds. We're going to heightened alert with what they've told us. They don't have much intel on the threat in our area but we're getting some.
We're sweating bullets. Somewhere up ahead is an armored force that's guessed by the Kurds to be about a division in strength. I didn't buy it. The one thing about the Kurds is that they always overestimate. But say a battalion. Even a brigade.
It's way more complicated than this, but this is military structure 101. Three platoons in a company. (You'll already notice ours has four including mortar platoon. And then there's the techs and Nepos . . . Like I said, this is 101.) Three platoons in a company. Three companies in a battalion. Three battalions in a brigade. Three brigades in a division.
More complicated but you get the idea.
Basically, if we're looking at anything like a normal battalion, we're outnumbered and outgunned three to one. And they've got our Abrams tanks, which are a bitch and a half to kill. Not to mention Strykers and Bradleys. Those were all confirmed as well as we could confirm it.
If they've got a brigade, we're outnumbered nine to one. And way outgunned. Then there's artillery which is going to way outrange our mortars. Their mortars.
There were also aircraft. Fighters dropping dumb bombs and some helicopters including a couple of Apache gunships. Those, right there, could rip Strykers a new one without breaking a sweat. The trucks? Toast.
We are on a heightened state of alert.
We've moved to constant movement for the time being. I want to get past Baghdad as fast as possible. The main force seemed to be to the north but the fucking Baghdad area is never good.
So we're moving by day. And I get word that there's a visual contact on a plane. Whoa.
Context for the young people: Back before the Plague there were always planes in the sky. Fucking always. One of the weirdest things about the few days post-9/11 was the lack of planes. And when they started coming back we all cringed. Compared to the Plague, 9/11 was a kiss on the cheek. But it was all we had as comparison back then.
They're coming back, but still not up to the level they were in 2018.
Since the Plague, if we saw something in the sky it had been a bird. I'd never even launched our UAVs. (Hadn't had to. The Scouts had them at the moment and we still hadn't used them.)
Zero planes. Nada.
So when we got reports of a plane, we went on really high alert.
Okay. The LOG had had a lot of shit in it. Among other things, it had had Stinger missiles. Not sure why. The only air threat around was the U.S. Air Force. And while having been under blue-on-blue fire once I could see some benefit to blowing up an Air Force plane, they frown on that sort of thing.
But the fucker had had swaggersticks. What can I say? Maybe the guy running it was from Minnesota.
Point being, we had Stingers. We didn't have any qualified Stinger guys, but we had Stingers. And it wasn't as if my guys couldn't read the manual. And a Stinger is very easy to use.
So we might be able to take out a fighter if it got low enough for a good bomb drop. Probably wouldn't, but then we'd just take our chances.
Problem being, the guys said this was a big one. A transport.
This I had to see.
That was tough.
The commo van didn't have a good way to see out except the commander's cupola. So I pulled the commander out, over his protests, and climbed up in his seat.
Binos. Old fashioned optics.
It was a plane. A big transport. And it was just sort of lazing around up there.
Suddenly it turned and passed south down our west side near Baghdad. Banked around and headed back.
The edges of the Baghdad suburbs were in view to the west. Barely. We were staying as low as we could given the terrain. But while there was some terrain it was mostly pretty flat. There was a bit of haze and I hoped that would let us get past unnoticed.
But this transport had apparently noticed us. I thought, maybe, possibly, could it be a supply drop? Nobody had called ahead. Didn't seem likely.
I had to climb up on top of the vehicle, not a good exercise normally, to see over the box on the back. There were grab handles, thank God. It was lining up behind us. It was a transport but transports can drop bombs. Didn't seem likely, but I was starting to get a puckering feeling. It definitely seemed to be looking for somebody like us.
Passed overhead at about two thousand feet over ground level. Flaps down, going slow. Russian Antonov. What the fuck?
We're still on that flat fucking plain. Still farms and occasional irrigation canals. More widespread on the latter, bigger on the former. More "industrial." Sunni Triangle. Saddam made sure the good farmers got the good equipment.
So we're bounding over this field at about thirty miles an hour and I'm trying to get back in the commander's hatch when the bird starts dropping shit. Not bombs. First there's a set of personnel parachutes. Standard static-line drop, the easiest kind in the world. Then a bunch of parachute bundles.
Are we getting reinforced?
I get back into the commo van and everybody is "what the fuck"ing. So I spread the word we don't know what it is and the scouts are to check out the drop. And I go "what the fuck?" and get on the horn to Brigade.
Brigade knows fucking diddly. No, no transport drops. No transport planes that they know of outside U.S. states and posessions. Most grounded. Cannibalization. Bad here.
Scouts come back while I'm on the phone with Brigade.
"Sir . . . No threat. Need you up here."
It's reporters.
Flying assholes from the sky.
They're scattered across a field but the scouts have helpfully gathered them up and gotten all their bundles for them. It's a team of six. One of them I vaguely recognize.
"Graham Trent, Skynews. Bandit Six, I presume."
(Look, it was his reference, not mine.)
Most people have probably heard the story. It's still in reruns. If you haven't, here goes.
Skynews (I tend to call it SkyNet. Kids, get your parents or grandparents to explain the reference) along with Fox and a bunch of other "media" holdings were owned by this guy named Rupert Murdoch.
Fairly conservative, for a Brit, and a bit of a character. He'd used the character, and a fucking ruthless business sense, to build up a pretty fair business empire.
Skynews was a British satellite news service. The Brits, then and now, had the BBC, the Beeb, which was paid for by the government. (From taxes on TVs. If you had a TV, you paid a yearly tax to watch it, I shit you not. And it went to the Beeb.)
Going up against a government monopoly was hard. But Murdoch knew there was money in giving people something other than the relentless propaganda of the Beeb. Oh, the Beeb occasionally had "alternative view" programming, but not in its news. It's news was pure liberal tofu-eater, rainbow this and global warming that.
So he founded Skynews. And it had made a fair amount of brass. (Brit for change. Got brass in pocket. Money.) That was, up to the Plague when shit was falling everywhere.
The Brits, despite being overall much more socialist than the U.S., had not been seizing businesses left and right. But they also weren't propping them up. And they especially weren't propping up Murdoch. He was barely holding on. He knew that he needed a gimmick to get some viewers. Preferably something he could sell to other networks that still had money.
(Oh, the U.S. "networks," NBC, CBS and ABC, were all being supported by "government emergency support spending." Fox, which was owned by Murdoch, was not. CNN somehow, though, had gotten in on the money. Politics? Nah.)
He needed a show that people were going to watch.
What was the biggest news story in terms of viewership in the U.S. and Britain?
You guessed it.
(The U.S. for reasons previously described. The British because they had a thing for the Nepos as well and, having a bit better history program in school, the whole "Ten Thousand" thing had caught on.)
So he, and it was Murdoch, got a brilliant idea. Send out a news crew to embed with us. It was going to take cash he didn't have, but if it worked it was going to be big news. His stocks, where stock markets were still trading, would go up. He would get more viewers. Might sell subsidiary rights.
He was putting most of his remaining wad on a roulette square marked Bandit Six. Yeah, some days I still dream about walking up to him and whispering "Residuals."
I got this, more or less, from Graham Trent when I pulled him over to the side to get a brief conversation away from the troops. By then the rest of the unit had caught up. Scouts were out forward, the unit had spread automatically. The Nepos were grinning in their turrets. No immediate threats.
There was some sort of building. A pumping station, something, by one of the irrigation canals we were going to have to cross. I could get out of sight for the conversation by pulling him around to the side. Unfortunately, that left us nearly at the waterline.
He laid this all out for me grinning ear to ear. What a lark! Wasn't this grand! Russian bird. Flew in from Greece. Good luck we found you, eh? Make you famous.
I'd asked what was going on and since then just nodded. Calmly. He was pumped up. Turned out they hadn't practiced the jump at all. First time out of a bird. Flying on that adrenaline high. I'll give him credit for brass ones.
I grabbed him by the front of his fucking safari jacket, down to the water, into the canal and then pressed his face under the water. Looking up. I wanted to watch.
I kept him there, despite his struggles, until I could tell he was about to pass out. Then, against my better judgement, I let the fucking idiot have air.
What? What? What's all this, then?
"Listen, you little pissant," I said, slamming him up against the wall of the concrete building. I don't even recall carrying him up the pretty steep and slippery slope. And he was not a small guy. Didn't matter. "Let me tell you what you and your fucking boss have done. You have just probably killed us. All of us. Including you. I figured we had about a one in seventy shot of making it to the fucking Dardanelles. We're looking at having to take on three to ten times our numbers in firepower to have any shot. You've just added six fucking useless mouths to my force. Six seats I have to find room for. Six slots to load gear into. And you're going to want to give fucking 'regular reports' since you're in the news business and every last fucking RIF with a damned satellite dish and power is going to know we're coming and more or less where and when. Last but most assuredly not least, you just did a fucking drop in full view of Baghdad which I was sincerely hoping to slip by unnoticed. My first thought is to just kill all of you. Nobody would ever know. Overrun by RIFs before we got to them. Poor brave reporter bastards. Never stood a chance. Are you listening? Do you clearly understand my dilemma? That dilemma being whether to push in with my forearm and crack your hyoid to leave you to choke in your own blood, walk around the corner and say 'Kill them. Kill them all.'? Because my boys won't bat an eye and they will never, ever talk."
He'd gone white. Whiter. He'd gone white when he realized I was drowning him and not just kidding around.
"We hadn't realized it was that bad . . . I'm sorry. Sorry."
He wasn't pleading to live. He clearly understood what I'd said and realized how badly he had screwed us.
I doubt I could have killed him if that hadn't been his reaction. But I was sorely sorely tempted.
"You're working for me, now. Not Murdoch. You will send what I say and when I say. You will explain to your crew, who I hope all include smart people, just what a fucked up situation they have dropped into."
"You've got it."
"It's going to be censorship."
"If it keeps us, all of us, your Yanks, the Nepos, my crew, alive, I can work with that."
"You fell in the stream. We laughed about it."
"Got it."
The fucked up thing was that I knew what I was going to do before I'd ever pushed him underwater. I knew in a moment while he was talking. Oh, not the details but the outline and it never was much more than an outline.
I hadn't pushed him under because I was negotiating. I really had had as my first plan killing them. Nobody would ever know.
But I went with Plan B.
Rupert Murdoch wanted news to prop up his flagging networks?
We'd give him the same kind of news the MSM had been sending for years: We'd be sending entertainment.
The only thing was, I was hoping to send much much more.
Get news back to what it was supposed to be.
If we survived.
We rolled out. Fast.
Didn't matter. We got hit, anyway.
I had the Scouts echelon to the west towards Baghdad. I figured if there was going to be a threat, it would be from that direction.
Sure enough, they spotted a line of trucks, couple of military grade and more pickups, some of them "technicals" rolling down the highway to cut us off.
When the trucks, in turn, spotted the Strykers some of them pulled off the road. Guys started bailing out. The technicals opened up and started weaving across the field.
Our guys started backing up. There were two Strykers moving by fire and maneuver. One would fire up the convoy moving slow while the other backed up fast, also firing but not as accurately. There was a line of trees they were headed for to get behind.
A bunch of the RIFs had dived into an irrigation ditch. Some of the technicals were smoked.
One of the Scout Strykers blew up. Just blew the fuck up. No clue why.
The other one backed up faster and started maneuvering. They didn't see anybody bail out of the other, which was billowing smoke.
I could see the smoke from the commo van. It had external viewers even if they were lousy for spotting planes. I told Fillup to maneuver his unit and find out what had killed them. There was a marker for the enemy unit where the scouts said it was. Pretty much a klick from where they first engaged, klick and a half to where the Stryker was hit.
Second Stryker maneuvered into the trees. One of them blew up but the Stryker lived.
They had Javelins.
Only two, thank God, but that's what we found when we rolled over their position. One sight and two expended launchers. For one of our vehicles.
DOD, on orders from the Secretary of Defense under consultation with State, gave the whole damned LOG base in Iraq to the fucking Sunnis. Including the Javelins.
We checked out the Stryker. It was toast. They don't have much in the way of internal blast control. The Javelin had hit just behind the commander's cupola and just blew the Stryker up like a child's toy. You could see the little-ass hole where it hit. Little hole, big boom.
We pulled every last body out and into body bags. They went on the supply truck.
I thought about Javelins as we rolled. That and the reporters. At one of the "rest" stops I tossed everybody but Graham out of the commo van and we "talked."
I said "rest" stops because we never really rested through those few days. It went like this. The Strykers had to fuel. Drivers got tired and logy and that led to accidents. Etc.
The guys could sort of rest riding in the Strykers. Not well, but it was "military rest." Like "military law" and "military music." You could close your eyes. If you were very experienced you could sleep the sleep of the just. Generally you sort of floated in a white daze that sort of helped.
Most of the infantry could come out of it fighting as fast as if they'd been awake.
But the drivers had to work, constantly. You had to rotate them. The AFV and the truck and the rest.
We'd gotten it down to an art. I'd order a rest stop at a certain point followed by "Logging." That's what it's called. As in "Logistics resupply."
We'd stop. Drivers would switch. New driver would hop in the seat, old driver would grab a spot and we'd roll on. Took about ten seconds. Think "Chinese Fire Drill."
Then we'd roll slowly. We had four trucks lined up. Food truck, ammo truck, fuel truck, supply (trash) truck.
Stryker would come up on either side of the food Hemmitt. Track commander would hold up fingers if he wanted cases of MREs. Number would be tossed. Speed up a bit to the ammo truck. Shout what they needed. Cases of ammo would be tossed. Speed up to the fuel truck. Grinning Nepo would toss a fuel line. Guys would drag it to the fuel point and fuel as the truck and the Stryker drove alongside. Fueled up, fuel line goes back, roll up to the (supply/trash) truck. Any critical supply needs? No. Toss me your trash. Bag of trash (mostly MRE bags, empty) would go over. Stryker would speed up and get into security position.
We only had to stop moving to change drivers.
The Navy calls it "UNREP," underway replenishment. We called it "logging."
When we had eight trucks and plenty of room, we could do two simultaneous loggings. Later we only did one. Eventually, we'd do a halt. Things were just too fucked up, guys were too tired, to trust logging.
But for then, we could unrep fast.
And later, well, there weren't as many Strykers to fuel.
So while I thought about the fucking bind I was in, I talked with Graham. And, yes, I could multitask it.
I asked him what the normal method of sending out this sort of stuff was. Turned out the answer was "it's complicated." Generally is.
There are two sources of any news, print, video, whatever. The first is "primary source" news reports. That's when you've got a known person standing in front of a news camera or a known "byline" reporting in paper or a known voice doing radio. Twenty-four-hour news cycle, they get a few minutes a day. Unless they get really popular, then they get their own show and eventually become an anchor and senior producer and such. Won't go into career progression in the news field.
But most video people saw on TV, and most news stories and most written stories that got converted to voice, was done by "secondary" sources. Stringers. Stringers were usually locals who had developed some connection within their news area. I'm going to stop talking about print because here's where it got interesting.
Stringers didn't sell to the networks. A bit more about print. AP got most of the news from stringers and then sent it on, sometimes with editing that was a bit, ahem, slanted and getting to pick and choose what was going to be news (people defending themselves with guns was never news, gays beating up straights or blacks attacking whites for hate reasons was never news). That was print. Also much of the Internet news and news reports read on radio. About eighty to ninety percent.
AP controlled all of that news. If they didn't think it was news, it wasn't news. Talk about a monopoly.
Video had avoided that for a long time. In the '60s and '70s, TV news was the networks and they filled a bare hour or two of mostly repetitive news. News from distant lands came in by film and then video tape. It was edited at the national studio, script was written and then broadcast. Local news followed the same pattern but without the flying it in. They got that from their parent network.
And all the networks had fair sized "bureaus" in major capitals. So did print.
But with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle they needed more and more video. So there started to be stringers. They'd go through the local bureaus.
But they needed more and more and more. And at the same time they were cutting back bureaus and foreign reporters.
So the media got together and formed a third party that would collect all the stringer videos. Most of it wasn't used. That got cut. Unimportant? Who knows. Nobody ever saw it. What definitely got cut was anything related to context and the networks never saw any of it. All there were were clips of dramatic shots.
The networks paid for the clips and then did voice-over based on the description the company gave of what the clips meant. That was for, call it "Western" news channels. For other countries, for more money, the company also did voice-over in local language.
Follow the money. Here's the thing.
Most of their clients for voice-over, more money, were in the Middle East and dictatorships with an axe to grind against the U.S. and Israel. So, you've got a clip of Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers, Israeli soldiers returning fire and a kid dead in his father's arms.
You're cutting that down to thirty seconds. You've got excellent shots of each of these if each is held as a chunk: twenty seconds of Palestinian fire, twenty of Israeli and ten of the dead kid. (Which is just a shot of a dead kid and a grieving father. No clue what kind of bullet.)
You can make one for the Western market with the Palestinians shooting and one for the Arab market of the Israelis but that takes time. And time is money.
You're a company out to make a buck. Your best paying clients are Arabs.
You make a clip of Israeli soldiers shooting and a dead kid in his dad's arms. The voice-over can be very plain. Just "an outbreak of fighting between Palestinian and Israeli forces left three dead including a twelve-year-old boy."
People never see the Palestinians shooting.
Nobody sees it. Not the networks, not the Arabs, not the Israelis who are watching "Western" TV news. As far as they are aware, the Palestinians were just peacefully singing kumbaya when the Israelis opened fire and the kid can only be dead from the Israelis because only the Israelis are shooting. Right?
In the 1990s the company, based in London, was bought by a holding company from the network "cartel." The holding company was owned by the Saudi Royal family.
By 2001, the vast majority of the employees of the company were Islamic. Sunni to be precise.
And it controlled the broadcast news for the entire world.
Plot?
You betcha.
During a seminar in Arab-Western relations in the 1980s, the future king of Saudi Arabia said that "nothing is more paramount than gaining favorable media attention to the plight of the Arab peoples."
This from a guy who owned more Rolls Royces than you could stick in a very big LOG base.
Well, the broadcast news world was in tatters. It was barely functioning even with government largesse. And the Saudis, for the moment, weren't producing oil or money or anything else. The whole region was a vastly overpopulated desert. It had been L.A. times ten and wasn't coming back soon. I had no clue what was happening with that company in London. (And, no Graham didn't tell me all that. He told me bits, how he and Skynet did things, and I had other bits and I worked the rest out in research later. But I'd heard the basics long before.)
We wouldn't be going through that company, though. The way that Graham did stuff was he shot a bunch of clips, whatever struck his and his producer's fancy, then sent them back to London and Skynet. It all got edited there. They might get a request to concentrate on something after a bit. A particular human interest angle, for example.
They'd gotten video of our blown-up Stryker. Also of the dead Iraqis. Also of the Javelins.
We'd gotten video of them dropping out of the sky. Not as good as theirs but very close.
And while they had good uplink/downlink, we had better.
I also had a couple of aces in the hole.
So I told him what we were going to do. And he got white again. Whiter.